Scrub garments are uniforms typically worn by doctors, nurses, and other medical workers in hospital operating rooms or other locations where the workers are likely to be in immediate proximity with patients. These scrub garments are hereafter called "scrubs". Scrubs provide an easily-changed launderable barrier between the wearer and the patient, helping to prevent the patient from exposure to germs or infectants on the wearer's body or street clothing, and also helping to protect the wearer's body from direct physical contact with a patient.
Scrubs usually are two-piece garments, consisting of a top or shirt and a bottom or pants. The tops and bottoms are stocked in different sizes to accommodate the needs of individual wearers. Scrub jackets also are worn by doctors and others. Soiled scrubs are collected for laundering and subsequent reuse, but scrubs must be periodically replaced due to wear and tear encountered in normal use as well as the effects of repeated launderings using the high temperatures and detergents required to clean and sterilize the soiled scrubs.
Hospitals normally make scrubs available to doctors and other medical workers at no direct cost to those users. Although each user is supposed to have only a limited number of scrubs at any given time for his or her personal use, some users will hoard scrubs of their size to maintain their own personal reserve. Other users may appropriate extra sets of scrubs for their own personal use, at home or elsewhere outside the hospital. These and other improper uses of scrubs contribute to an unacceptable shrinkage in the inventory of scrubs maintained by the institution for use by authorized persons.
This inventory problem is aggravated by careless handling; where scrubs are stacked for use by anyone, some people will withdraw a scrub from within the pile instead of removing the scrub at the top of the pile. This action often inadvertently dumps one or more clean scrubs from the pile onto the floor. That scrub must be relaundered before use, thereby reducing the remaining useful life of the scrub without the benefit of its use before relaundering. Both the shrinkage of the scrub inventory and the need for relaundering scrubs due to careless handling of increases the cost of providing and maintaining a sufficient supply of scrubs.
Some hospitals try to control the distribution of scrubs by requiring users to check out scrubs from personnel at central locations. Using this approach, each authorized individual is permitted to have no more than a certain number of scrubs in his or her possession at any time. The individual must return soiled scrubs to receive credit for clean scrubs. Although this approach can alleviate the problems mentioned above, it is expensive to maintain. Many hospitals are large enough to require several scrub-dispensing locations throughout the hospital. Furthermore, because hospitals never close, scrub dispensing locations must be staffed around the clock. The direct and indirect labor costs of that staffing add significantly to the overall cost of maintaining an adequate inventory of scrubs.
It has been proposed to overcome the foregoing problems by dispensing scrubs from a vending machine. However, the kinds of vending machines currently available in the art, and the nature of articles such as scrubs, have not made vending machines a practical solution to those problems. Most current vending machines operate on the principle that the items being dispensed are held on a shelf awaiting dispensing. The individual items then are pushed to the edge of the shelf and allowed to fall to the bottom of the machine. A door in the bottom allows access to the dispensed item by the user. The disadvantages of such machines are that they are relatively large in depth because of the space required to store the products on shelves and to allow room for free fall to the bottom of the machine. That free fall space also detracts from volume in the machine that otherwise could hold a larger inventory of scrubs. The overall size of the vending machine is particularly important in hospital applications, because such machines used for vending scrubs may be placed in hallways or other locations not sized to receive conventional vending machines.
Another common kind of vending machine is the so-called pinwheel machine. The items being vended are received in compartments on a pinwheel or carousel within the machine, and each item is given access to an exit door by turning the pinwheel to place the item in front of that door. These machines also have a size disadvantage because at least two dimensions of the machine (for example, depth and width) must be the same to accommodate the round pinwheel.
The nature of scrubs themselves compounds the difficulty of dispensing those goods through a conventional vending machine. Most vending machines dispense discrete articles having a fixed and unchanging physical size or shape. For example, beverage cans or bottles, cigarette packages, and candy bars each have relatively fixed and rigid shapes that allow handling those articles by the mechanism of a vending machine. Scrubs, in contrast with most other discrete articles dispensed by a vending machine, are relatively soft folded garments that are not within a rigid package. Due to the relative flexibility and low mass of scrubs, they are not readily vendable by machines that move or transport the goods from a storage location to an access door.